Movie review: Flavorless ’Salt’ can’t shake cliches

Friday

As if this summer’s sour crop of movies wasn’t painful enough, the folks at Sony have gone and dumped “Salt” into the wound.

As if this summer’s sour crop of movies wasn’t painful enough, the folks at Sony have gone and dumped “Salt” into the wound.

Of course, that statement would suggest that “Salt” had the power to sting, which it doesn’t. If anything, it anesthetizes, lulling you to sleep with action-spy clichés that have been moldering since the Reagan administration.

Apropos, considering director Phillip Noyce is also a relic of that mindless era, when story and characters were secondary to glitz and action. And that, in a sentence, is “Salt,” a 90-minute slog in which Angelina Jolie essentially cashes a check with a performance that real-life spy Anna Chapman could do in her beauty sleep.

Granted, Chapman was more looker than spy, but she certainly had more on the ball than Jolie’s Evelyn Salt, an agent whose loyalties are questioned after being linked to a grandiose plot to take out the leaders of both Russia and the United States. Is she really a Russian mole, as everyone suspects? That query is meant to linger, but you’d have to be a moron not to figure out the answer straight away.

A more intriguing riddle is whether Evelyn Salt is actually human. She looks and behaves like a droid, and her seemingly indestructible body suggests a second coming of Wile E Coyote.

No bullet, fall or insipid line of dialogue seems to faze her, as she sets out to both clear her name and find her equally humorless and suddenly vanished husband.

The joke is that we’re supposed to care about all this. And perhaps we would have if Noyce and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer provided one reason to acquire a rooting interest in a succession of bland characters, rote plot twists and cheesy action sequences set to an intrusive and overbearing score by James Newton Howard.

It also doesn’t help that “Salt” so closely resembles the Jason Bourne movies, not to mention the recent “Knight and Day” starring Tom Cruise, who, ironically, was originally slated to play Salt before wisely opting for “K&D,” the infinitely better rogue-spy-on-the-run picture.

And while it’s admirable that Noyce recast the role for a woman, it’s disappointing that it’s in service of a “Salt” peppered with so many action tropes.

Physically, Jolie more than holds up her end of the bargain playing the preposterous action scenes fairly convincingly, especially in the film’s one great moment when Salt finds an inventive way to strangle a foe with handcuffs. But on a human level, Jolie just fades into the high-tech scenery.

The supporting cast – which includes Liev Schreiber as Salt’s shifty-looking ally at Langley, Hunt Block as the befuddled U.S. president and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Salt’s chief pursuer – is mediocre at best. But given how little each is provided, it’s small wonder.

The biggest disappointment by far is Jolie, who after a hot start to her career, has repeatedly wasted her talents on a succession of movies that fail to play to her strengths. And the artery-clogging “Salt” may well be the deadliest.

Patriot Ledger writer Al Alexander may be reached at aalexander@ledger.com.